The New Zealand Herald is bringing back some of the best premium stories of 2020. Today we look at five of the best Canvas stories of the year.
Thomas the Train, three children and me...
Casper has just turned 3. I never intended to get him interested in trains, because I was never much interested in them myself. Dad bought him a train set for his first birthday and he likes playing with it. I don't know why he likes it. I particularly don't know why he likes Thomas. As far as I know he's never watched it on TV. He has two Thomas T-shirts. Maybe that's it.
We went Glenbrook mainly because of Dad, for whom trains were central in life and are now central in death, because he is buried next to the tracks at Purewa. For years, at the slightest hint of a train, he would tell the story of the time he took me to Glenbrook when I was a toddler and I spent the whole time screaming. As I got older, I became increasingly aware the reason he kept repeating the story was that he wanted us to go back. We never did.
For many years, I had thought about going with him to Glenbrook, a nostalgia trip that would, I assumed, have allowed us to access our shared history and reclaim the pure bond a small child has with its parents. After I'd had kids, I imagined it more as a connection between him and them, via an emotional tightening with me. With both those options now gone, the only possibility left was to do what could be done.
Greg Bruce dreamt of a fun family day out. It didn't quite work out that way.
Inside Auckland's adults-only maths club
You have 42 coins. One is fake and the wrong weight. How many pints of craft beer does it take to work out if the counterfeit coin is lighter or heavier than all the others?
On the second to last Tuesday of every month, in 118 locations around the world, people go to the pub to do maths. MathsJam is an adults-only event, held on licensed premises where participants download that month's "shout" - a sheet of problems posed by numerate compatriots in Milan or London or wherever - and work together on solutions.
Not everybody hates maths and perhaps the rest of us shouldn't either, discovers Kim Knight.
A story of All Black infatuation
I can clearly remember the moment I fell in love with him. It was his first game for Auckland, against Canterbury, at the beginning of the 1993 NPC season. He played first five-eighth, opposite future All Black icon Andrew Mehrtens, who he outplayed and embarrassed with a perfectly judged selection from his extravagant buffet of skills. I sat alongside my dad, high in the north stand at Eden Park and watched, agog. I knew he would go on to greatness and I would go with him.
I cannot remember the moment I fell in love with him. I checked with the Auckland Rugby Union, which told me the team's only game against Canterbury that year was September, the end of the season, by which time he'd already played three tests for the All Blacks. He didn't even play first five-eighth that day.
Maybe I fell in love with him when he scored two tries for Manawatū against Ireland in 1992 or when he scored four tries for Auckland against Horowhenua in April 1993. It doesn't really matter - origin stories are usually self-serving fictions anyway. What I do know is that by mid-1993, when his debut performance for the All Blacks made him a national hero, he already belonged to me. His performance was my performance. I had never been so proud of myself.
As a new generation of All Black heroes takes the field, Greg Bruce goes in search of an old one.
Dancing in the dark - behind the scenes at a strip club
For a time, I worked as a lighting operator and projectionist in a strip-club and porn-movie theatre called the Eros. It was one of those jobs you fell into, rather than envisioned, as a career-path. I had a friend, a singer and performer and she'd told me about the vacancy. The hours were good and the pay was reasonable.
The Eros was on George St in Sydney. I started work at 9am, travelling on the Eastern Suburbs line to Town Hall station with the morning suit-and-briefcase commuters – then I would peel off at the Eros instead of a multi-storeyedoffice building.
Most often - and particularly in the weekends - there was already a short queue of men waiting for the cinema doors to be unlocked. I always found this surprising, but then it was the 1980s and there was no internet. Access to any form of erotica was limited.
The Eros also had real girls – on the hour, every hour – who stripped for 12-15 minute performances between movies. It was another attraction.
How and why not to get your hair cut over Zoom
During lockdown my wife bought a hairdressing set, including cutting scissors, thinning scissors and a comb. She had bought it to give our son his first haircut, which she delivered just before his 3rd birthday, while watching a YouTube tutorial that he turned off a few minutes in and which she couldn't be bothered putting back on. The end result looked great: short and textured at the back, floppy and cute at the front. It really was a stylish haircut; lots of people said so, not just me. Zanna was quite self-deprecating about it. She said halfway through she had become bored and just started chopping, which I guess I should have taken as a warning but I'm embarrassingly in love with her and often miss these signals.
When Morgan my hairdresser appeared on Zoom on the laptop I'd placed in front of me on the kitchen bench, our place was crawling with children. Clara (4) sat on my lap, while Tallulah (6) and Casper (3) snaked in and out of the screen, looking at themselves in the small box in the corner. Later, Zanna would make a big deal about this, as if the presence of the children had been responsible for what happened.
Greg Bruce gathered his barber and wife for a haircut via Zoom. What could go right?
